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Text Message Marketing Startup Emotive Lays Off 18% of Staff
Samson Amore
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.
Marketing startup Emotive laid off 30 people this week as the outlook on the economy continues to sour.
CEO Brian Zatulove said that 18% of the Sawtelle-based company’s roughly 167-strong workforce was cut, adding in an email statement that the layoffs are part of a larger plan to generate lasting revenue.
“Over the last three years, software investors have favored growth over profitability. Given the shift over the last 6 months amid the drawdown in public [software-as-a-service] valuations, we made the decision to get on a path to profitability,” Zatulove said. “Despite all of this, we think it’s critical for the business to have a clear path to becoming profitable, with infinite runway, given the uncertain economic climate & future [and] we are now on that path” following layoffs."
Zatulove didn’t immediately clarify which positions in the company had been cut.
Two former Emotive staffers posted about their job losses on LinkedIn, including a one-time, L.A.-based senior technical recruiter who’d started working there last January and an ex-customer onboarding specialist who’d worked there for roughly a year. The two didn’t return requests for comment.
Emotive is now at least the second SMS marketing company in Los Angeles to undergo layoffs in recent months. The other was Voyage, which laid off roughly 10% of its staff in June. Still, Zatulove pushed back on the idea that the layoffs at Emotive had anything to do with a larger market trends.
While he acknowledged software stocks are taking a beating, Zatulove said, “our decision to reduce actually has nothing to do with any broader ecommerce trends. Consumer spending is still healthy from what we're seeing.”
Emotive’s core product is a marketing platform that uses artificial intelligence and human analysis to reach out to customers who use Shopify and other ecommerce sites by text, encouraging them to buy products. The business is looking to expand into other areas as well. It launched a conversational advertising platform called Emotive Ads this year and is working on a tool that allows shoppers to make payments through SMS.
“In terms of where we are headed, nothing changes strategically,” Zatulove told dot.LA. “We’re going to keep investing there alongside the core SMS product,” adding that “the business has grown 3x over the last 24 months. We’re coming off a strong quarter.”
In February 2021, the company raised a $50 million Series B funding round. Zatulove said the company’s raised $103 million since its 2018 launch, which breaks down to $78 million in equity and $25 million in debt.
In announcing the raise last year, Emotive said its plans were to use part of that funding to triple its workforce and opened satellite offices in Boston and Atlanta.
“In our view, the best-positioned companies in any broader downturn are the profitable ones. The ones that own their destiny,” Zatulove said. “We’ve positioned ourselves financially to control our destiny and be secure throughout this uncertain time in history.”
This is a developing story. Have a tip? Contact Samson Amore at samsonamore@dot.LA or on Signal at (401).287.5543.
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Samson Amore
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.
https://twitter.com/samsonamore
samsonamore@dot.la
LA Tech Week: Six LA-Based Greentech Startups to Know
11:47 AM | June 09, 2023
Samson Amore
At Lowercarbon Capital’s LA Tech Week event Thursday, the synergy between the region’s aerospace industry and greentech startups was clear.
The event sponsored by Lowercarbon, Climate Draft (and the defunct Silicon Valley Bank’s Climate Technology & Sustainability team) brought together a handful of local startups in Hawthorne not far from LAX, and many of the companies shared DNA with arguably the region’s most famous tech resident: SpaceX.
Here’s a look at the greentech startups that pitched during the Tech Week event, and how they think what they’re building could help solve the climate crisis.
Arbor: Based in El Segundo, this year-old startup is working to convert organic waste into energy and fresh water. At the same time, it also uses biomass carbon removal and storage to remove carbon from the atmosphere and sequester it in an attempt to avoid further damaging the earth’s ozone layer. At the Tech Week event Thursday, Arbor CEO Brad Hartwig told a stunned crowd that Arbor aims to remove about five billion tons of organic waste from landfills and turn that into about 6 PWh, or a quarter of the global electricity need, each year. Hartwig is an alumni of SpaceX; he was a manufacturing engineer on the Crew Dragon engines from 2016-2018 and later a flight test engineer at Kitty Hawk.
Antora: Sunnyvale-based Antora Energy was founded in 2017, making it one of the oldest companies on the pitching block during the event. Backed by investors including the National Science Foundation and Los Angeles-based Overture VC, Antora has raised roughly $57 million to date, most recently a $50 million round last February. Chief operating officer Justin Briggs said Antora’s goal is to modernize and popularize thermal energy storage using ultra-hot carbon. Massive heated carbon blocks can give off thermal energy, which Antora’s proprietary batteries then absorb and store as energy. It’s an ambitious goal, but one the world needs at scale to green its energy footprint. According to Briggs, “the biggest challenge is how can we turn back variable intermittent renewable electricity into something that's reliable and on demand, so we can use it to provide energy to everything we need.”
Arc: Hosting the panel was Arc, an electric boating company that’s gained surprising momentum, moving from design to delivering its first e-boats in just two years of existence. Founded in 2021, the company’s already 70 employees strong and has already sold some of its first e-boats to customers willing to pay the luxury price tag, CTO Ryan Cook said Thursday. Cook said that to meet the power needs of a battery-powered speedboat, the Arc team designed the vehicle around the battery pack with the goal of it being competitive with gas boats when compared to range and cost of gas. But on the pricing side, it’s not cheap. Arc’s flagship vessel, the Arc One is expected to cost roughly $300,000. During the panel, Cook compared the boat to being “like an early Tesla Roadster.” To date Arc Boats has raised just over $35 million, according to PitchBook, from investors including Kevin Durant, Will Smith and Sean “Diddy” Combs.
Clarity Technology: Carbon removal startup Clarity is based in LA and was founded by Yale graduate and CEO Glen Meyerowitz last year. Clarity is working to make “gigaton solutions for gigaton problems.” Their aim? To remove up to 2,000 billion pounds of carbon from the atmosphere through direct air capture, a process which uses massive fans to move chemicals that capture CO2. But the challenge, Meyerowitz noted in his speech, is doing this at scale in a way that makes an actual dent in the planet’s emissions while also efficiently using the electricity needed to do so. Meyerowitz spent nearly five years working as an engineer for SpaceX in Texas, and added he’s looking to transfer those learnings into Clarity.
Parallel Systems: Based in Downtown LA’s Arts District, this startup is building zero-emission rail vehicles that are capable of long-haul journeys otherwise done by a trucking company. The estimated $700 billion trucking industry, Parallel Systems CEO Matt Soule said, is ripe for an overhaul and could benefit from moving some of its goods off-road to electric railcars. According to Soule, Parallel’s electric battery-powered rail vehicles use 25% of the energy a semi truck uses, and at a competitive cost. Funded in part by a February 2022 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, Parallel Systems has raised about $57 million to date. Its most recent venture funding round was a $49 million Series A led by Santa Monica-based VC Anthos Capital. Local VCs including Riot Ventures and Santa Monica-based Embark Ventures are also backers of Parallel.
Terra Talent: Unlike the rest of the startups pitching at the Tech Week event, Terra Talent was focused on building teams rather than technology. Founder Dolly Singh worked at SpaceX, Oculus and Citadel as a headhunter, and now runs Terra, a talent and advisory firm that helps companies recruit top talent in the greentech space. But, she said, she’s concerned that all the work these startups are doing won’t matter unless we very quickly turn around the current trendlines. “Earth will shake us off like and she will do just fine in 10,000 years,” she said. “It’s our way of living, everything we love is actually here on earth… there’s nothing I love on Mars,” adding that she’s hopeful the startups that pitched during the event will be instrumental in making sure the planet stays habitable for a little while longer.
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Samson Amore
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.
https://twitter.com/samsonamore
samsonamore@dot.la
Jadu Raises $36M To Build An Augmented Reality Web3 Gaming Platform
01:12 PM | May 27, 2022
Photo courtesy of Jadu
Jadu, a Los Angeles-based augmented reality (AR) startup, has raised $36 million to build a gaming platform that lets players roam the real world with their NFT avatars.
Bain Capital led the Series A round and was joined by existing investor General Catalyst Partners. Other investors include LG Tech Ventures and Alumni Ventures. The new raise brings Jadu’s total funding to more than $45 million.
Launched in 2020, Jadu is developing an AR mobile app that connects to players’ Ethereum wallets, letting them turn their 3D animated NFTs into playable avatars. The app, which is expected to emerge from beta testing this summer, can integrate avatars from NFT collections like Deadfellaz, CyberKongz and FLUFs, as well as some from “The Sandbox” video game, according to Jadu.
Unlike other AR experiences where users navigate from a first-person point of view (think “Pokemon Go”), Jadu players can stay put and move their avatar characters around bedrooms or backyards. It has the effect of playing a third-person video game—with the real world as the landscape.
“Adding an avatar in the middle of [a player’s] view is a novel concept for AR, and it's kind of counterintuitive,” Jadu founder and CEO Asad J. Malik told dot.LA. “However, when you do it, suddenly it becomes really effective because your AR becomes super visual. You can actually see a representation of a character going around the room doing things.”
\u201cThe near-term future of the Metaverse is AR not VR and @JaduAVAs is building it.\n\n1/13 - \ud83e\uddf5\u201d— AJM \u2022 Jadu (@AJM \u2022 Jadu) 1650747301
The roughly 50-person company—which has much of its leadership team, including Malik, based in Los Angeles—started with an AR mobile app that let users dance next to life-like holograms of music artists like Lil Nas X and Pussy Riot. The idea was that users could record clips and post them on social media, showcasing complex AR experiences that weren’t available on other platforms, according to Malik. Some videos went viral on TikTok, and the initial iteration of Jadu was briefly among the 30 most downloaded entertainment apps in Apple’s App Store, Malik said.
But the goal was always to build a more expansive AR platform, and the Jadu team saw a chance to do that with the emergence of NFTs and the larger phenomenon of Web3, a vision for a decentralized version of the internet based on blockchain technology. Jadu quickly pivoted to building AR gameplay for Web3 avatars, selling accessories like jetpacks and hoverboards as NFTs. The startup earned more than $5 million from initial NFT sales, Malik said, and collects a 5% commission on the roughly $25 million in secondary sales those NFTs have done to date on platforms like OpenSea.
“We had always been looking for the right business model for AR and nothing had ever clicked,” Malik said, adding that in-app purchases or ads didn’t make sense. So when NFTs came along “that opportunity became so glaringly obvious to us that we immediately hard-pivoted,” he added.
Jadu plans to spend the new funds to grow its team and build out the gaming platform. Malik said the company is focused on releasing its first collection of in-house avatar NFTs, which is expected to be its primary revenue source this year. As the platform matures, Malk could foresee Jadu eventually charging commissions for third-parties to develop game items or experiences on its platform, he said.
The Jadu founder contends the near-term future of the metaverse—the loosely-defined term for the immersive and extensive online worlds—is with AR and not virtual reality, where users are completely immersed in 3D digital environments. He noted consumers have been slow to adopt VR headsets like Meta’s Quest or Sony’s Playstation VR; by contrast, more than a billion mobile devices can support the AR experiences Jadu is developing, Malik said.
“People are building out the metaverse as this interoperable virtual world,” Malik said. “We are building out what we call the ‘Mirrorverse’ as the AR reflection of that, and the ‘Mirrorverse’ exists on the physical planet—it exists on top of the world as we know it, and we think that's super compelling.”
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Christian Hetrick
Christian Hetrick is dot.LA's Entertainment Tech Reporter. He was formerly a business reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and reported on New Jersey politics for the Observer and the Press of Atlantic City.
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